Sunday, November 10, 2013

What they don't tell you in school

A couple of posts down, I spoke about Joe Williams, a reporter who happens to be a friend to this blog. (He wrote the book advertised to your right.) His recent interview with Oliver Stone is worth your attention, especially this part:

Q • When did JFK get off the bus of headlong empire building and become a peacemaker?

A • The turning point was the October ’62 missile crisis. But you have to remember he had been to Vietnam on a fact-finding mission in the ’50s, and he made very brave statements in the Senate about Vietnam and about the Algerian War and about the Third World’s hostility toward white colonists. But when you become president, it’s a different ballgame. Like Obama, he got sucked into this monstrous military-industrial complex. It drives me crazy that people don’t understand how our generals and these Dr. Strangelove characters wanted to wipe out the Soviet Union. Kennedy ended up resisting them. He fired the most sacred cow in Washington, Allen Dulles of the CIA, he refused to invade Laos and even when the Russians put up the Berlin Wall, he said, “A wall is far better than a war.”

In a future post, we may talk at greater length about the generals -- in particular, Curtis Lemay -- who wanted to wage nuclear war on the Soviet Union. In 2000, when the film Thirteen Days accurately depicted Lemay's billigerence during the Cuban missile crisis, Phil Strub -- the Pentagon-Hollywood liaison -- tried to get the movie deep-sixed for its "revisionism." This, despite the fact that Lemay's dialogue in that movie derives from things which the real man provably said.

The great untold tale of the 1960s -- the key fact which they never teach you in school -- can be simply stated: For a brief period in the early 1960s, the United States had a first-strike capability. Everything that happened then should be seen through that prism.

This was the era of the changeover from strategic bombing to ICBMs. Although the Soviets launched the first ICBM, we quickly sped ahead of them. They did not have a solid-fuel rocket capable of carrying large h-bombs until 1967. We developed that capability much earlier. (The Soviet R7, a liquid fueled rocket developed in the 1950s, required 20 hours of preparation before launch, and had other problems.)

This "first strike" window explains why the Russians put intermediate range missiles in Cuba. Those missiles gave the Soviets a way to strike back; without that deterrent, they were sitting ducks (should Lemay have his way). A surprisingly good account of the true origin of the missile crisis may be found here.

In 1961, JFK attended a meeting in which he was apprised of the fact that a first strike window would soon open. We had (or would soon have) ICBMs capable of reaching their targets in less than an hour; they did not, and would not have that capability for some years. Of course, an American strike would have murdered millions of people. As Kennedy walked away from this meeting, he told Dean Rusk: "And we call ourselves the human race."

But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R, based on our growing lead in land-based missiles, And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.

The United States had beaten the USSR to an operational ICBM and enjoyed clear, and growing, numerical advantage. We were far ahead, and our military planners knew it.

Kennedy was quickly convinced of this truth, which was further confirmed as new satellites brought back new information. Later in 1961, a National Intelligence Estimate came through showing only 4 Soviet ICBMs in place, all of them on low alert at a test site called Plesetsk. By fall, Defense Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric was to acknowledge in a public speech that US forces (with 185 ICBMs and over 3,400 deliverable warheads at that time) were vastly superior to those of the Russians.

During the missile crisis, Robert Kennedy told Soviet ambassador Dobrynin that the American military might soon stage a coup and launch a war.

Here's another important fact they don't tell you in school. JFK did not merely propose sending a man to the moon -- he issued NSAM 271, calling for a joint US-USSR lunar mission. (See here and here.) Such a joint mission would inevitably have led to the sharing of information about American ICBM technology.

For some reason, most people don't understand that the rockets that put monkeys and men into space were close kin to the rockets designed to plant a nuke in a Soviet military facility. For example, the Saturn I rockets (which sent American satellites into orbit) was a modified version of the Jupiter missiles we had placed in Turkey. (The Jupiters -- a terrible, instantly obsolete weapon system -- were removed after the missile crisis as part of a secret agreement with the Russians.)

So we know that in the fall of 1963, American hawks wanted to launch a first strike against they USSR. They knew that they would never again have such an opportunity. Of course, they needed a plausible casus belli.

Interesting stuff. So what stopped them from pinning the Dallas job on the KGB after all their preparation?

I don't believe the Jupiter missiles in Turkey (and near the heel of Italy) were "obsolete". That line is akin to the British bullshit that whereas "Gordon Lonsdale" (Konon Molody) was the real thing, a KGB illegal, poor old Greville Wynne was just a "British businessman" wrongly accused of spying by the unscrupulous Soviets who wanted a bargaining counter in their negotiations to free their own guy from a British jail. In fact, Wynne was a professional illegal spy, acting without diplomatic cover, just like "Lonsdale" - as is now recognised. At the time, and for several years afterwards, the British media referred to the whole Wynne business as just a dishonest operation by the Soviets to "save face".

...Admittedly the missile placements in Turkey and Cuba were only akin up to a point, and withdrawing IRBMs from Cuba was a bigger climbdown than withdrawing them from Italy and Turkey. But those Jupiters could still have obliterated some major Soviet population centres more easily than IRBMs in faraway West Germany or Britain could. They had their place on the strategic map. The official US story is probably still that they wouldn't have got off the ground, could have been taken out by a single sniper, might as well never have been there in the first place, were going to be removed anyway, so removing them as a sop to the Soviets was only doing what the he-man Pentagon was about to do of its own free volition anyway, etc. etc. Yeah, right.

PS During the US nuclear window of 1945-49, Bertrand Russell backed a US nuclear attack on the USSR. He really never should have creepily accepted the fellowship from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1944, after they expelled him two decades before for his principled opposition to WW1.

posted by b : 6:39 PM

b, you're right in that the Jupiters could have done massive damage. They were obsolete (pretty much from the moment they were "born") because they were just a bad design to begin with.

Can't recall where I saw it, but last night I ran across a page which averred that a well-placed sniper could have taken out a Jupiter with a rifle. The tanks were permeable, and they were stored out in the open, not in silos.

The idea of a burning rocket with a nuke on top is a bit unpleasant to contemplate.

Thanks for the info on the first-strike windows, Joseph! It fits in well with a piece I wrote a while back and have the timerity to share with you now:

FACTIONS WITHIN FACTIONS

In the very tricky business of dissecting the falsehoods of official history, one should never forget that there are often competing factions within factions -- and parallel conspirators plotting either to exploit, cancel, enhance, or re-direct the conspiracies of other plotters.

A prime case in point: the JFK Murder.

In 1961 the fascistic Joint Chiefs of Staff passionately wanted to invade Cuba and humiliate Russia, even at the risk of WWIII, which they were "sure" was winnable. ("We might get our hair mussed, but...") When all previous attempts to enlist the uncooperative young President in their mad scheme failed (the Cuban Missle Crisis, Operation Northwoods, et. al.) they opted instead to lend their support to one of the several ongoing plots, swirling about the Washington underworld at the time, to assassinate him... and blame Castro for sponsoring the deed!

Cooler (albeit still malevolent) heads prevailed (i.e. LBJ, Hoover, Warren, the intel spooks, etc.) and WWIII was providentially averted by their tightly controlling the subsequent "investigation" and assuring the public that Ozzie was NOT a "Castro agent" (despite all the planted evidence to that effect which then had to be discredited and discarded) but merely a "crazed lone nut".

JFK's multitudinous enemies (the Mob, Big Oil, the Fed Banksters, nuke-craving Israel, the Langley Boys, etc.) were all delighted to get a new Prez who had pledged to be far more permissive of their various evil agendas -- and even the generals and the arms merchants were quickly placated with the promise of a huge, protracted, proxy war in Southeast Asia, one that would not only enrich the merchants of violent death (via billions for fresh bombs, guns, planes and helicopters) but also secure the essential-to-the-money-laundering-banksters heroin trade from the Golden Triangle, for decades to come.

The Neocon/Israel-firster/PNAC fanatics were absolutely delighted when the generals helped them convince Daddy Bush to stage the 1991 Gulf War, essential as it was in keeping the Military-Industrial Complex humming after the 1989 Collapse of the Soviet Empire robbed the USA of a formidable "enemy".

But when the Iraqi Army had been successfully driven out of Kuwait and thoroughly decimated (via war-crime style massacring) during their long march of retreat, Bush the Elder took the generals' advice to declare victory and quit cold. A boots-on-the-ground invasion of Bagdad, they argued, would be foolhardy and too costly, since it would then entail several years of occupation, insurgency, and nation-building. But the Zionist Fifth Column was far from satisfied with this insufficiently bloody state of affairs, leaving in place as it did a sworn enemy of "The Chosen State," no matter how weakened by defeat and sanctions. So, the plotters employed their massive political-manipulation machinery to deny Daddy B a second term and began banking on a new, comparably spooked-up Oval Office tenant (the bastard Rockefeller descendant and sex maniac from Mena) to do their dirty work.

The casus belli (to justify an all-out invasion of Iraq) they settled on was a false-flag event to take place not in the Mideast, but in the American Heartland -- namely Oklahoma City. And why, you might ask..,

Because it was a city rich with credible patsies, namely a local population which four years earlier been supplemented by the RESETTLEMENT OF A LARGE CADRE OF IRAQIS who had been granted asylum in the USA after they had rendered "services" to the American military in its rout of Saddam's once-mighty forces. "Could some of these so-called refugees have been concealing their continuing loyalty to Saddam?" the sayanim-controlled media would quickly and loudly ask, in the wake of the bombs going off at the Federal Building -- and the hunt would be on to catch the "dark-skinned, Mideastern-looking" villains who had sought to violently avenge their dear leader's 1991 defeat at American hands.

Once caught, the patsies would be neatly framed with "slam-dunk" evidence that they were acting on orders from Bagdad, and because of the horrendous carnage (think of the little children butchered in the daycare centre!) Congress would have no choice but to authorise invasive war with (Israel's longtime enemy) IRAQ!

But the neocons' warmongering part of the plot was ultimately FOILED, apparently by other clever factions within the "shadow government" with different immediate priorities, namely storing-and-destroying certain government records harmful to the Clintonistas, and ramping up domestic paranoia about militia-style "hate groups in the Heartland" whose existence would help justify enacting (unconstitutional, of course) new police-state statutes. The behind-the-scenes struggle between the factions lasted a mere 72 hours, after which the media drumbeat about "dark-skinned Mideastern-looking" suspects ceased abruptly, to be replaced by a burgeoning narrative about a disgruntled ex-soldier who foolishly went for a drive without license plates.

And the Zionist Fifth Column bided their time for a season and more, confident that the generals and the spooks and the arms merchants and the banksters would eventually find common cause again in making war on Iraq. And they finally did, but only as grudging payback for acquiescence in the staging of 9/11, which had as its primary goal the re-stabilisation of a global heroin trade that had by 2001 shifted its primary sourcing from Southeast Asia to the hills of Afghanistan.

Toppling Saddam, while of prime importance to the Zio-faction, was distinctly a lesser priority of the other factions.

But hey, they finally pulled off BOTH mass-murder/human-sacrifice rituals (two invasions/wars/occupations in less than two years) on quite a grand scale after all, didn't they, despite some factional differences along the way.

And even if you DON'T believe in Satanic possession, you'll have to admit that these perps perform a pretty convincing imitation of it.